“911, what is your emergency?” The operator’s voice came clear and calm through the phone. I, on the other hand, was a wreck.
“My daddy,” I squawked. “I think he’s dead.”
“Can you feel for a pulse?” the operator asked, her voice still smooth and controlled. I looked at the putrid body that had once been my father. The thought of touching it made me want to vomit. “Ma’am, can you feel for a pulse?”
I swallowed my disgust and walked over to the body. Bending down I reached a shaking hand out to his neck. Mama watched us, her eyes glazed over, her body stiff. Daddy’s neck felt warm and slimy and I quickly withdrew my fingers. It wasn’t enough time to feel for a pulse, but there was no way what I’d just felt was alive.
“There’s no pulse!” I screeched into the phone, wanting to jump in a hot shower.
“I’ve dispatched responders to your location, ma’am.”
I lowered the phone from my ear and watched the scene around me, feeling like an actor in a movie. Mama was standing over Daddy’s dead body. My hands were covered in Daddy’s deadness. In the distance I heard sirens.
Dreams plagued my sleep like phantoms. My whole body ached and my head pounded like I’d been drinking. I could count the number of times I’d had spirits on my right hand, and I could count how many times I’d been drunk to boot: once. It didn’t take a genius to figure why I didn’t drink. When your daddy beats the fact that spirits are the devils juice into you over and over again, you start to believe it.
Funny thing is, that didn’t stop Daddy from partaking.
I rolled over, groaning into my pillow. I wished I had a magical remedy to remove the memories from my brain. In the day I could work hard and drive them to the back of my skull, but at night they surfaced. I wasn’t safe in my sleep.
Sun so bright it saturated my curtains made the room a luminous yellow-grey. I moaned and rolled over again because the sun hurt my eyes. The memories had drowned me and made me drunk without my consent, and now I was paying for it the morning after. They still thrummed in my head. With each punch of my headache a memory banged against my skull.
“Go away!” I screamed into my pillow, banging my fist against the headboard.
“I was just coming to check on ya.” I lifted my heavy head to see Vera in the doorway, holding two cups of some kind of liquid. “I brought you tea.” She raised the cups. “It’s past noon, I was getting worried. Have a little too much fun last night?”
I shifted and sat up in the bed. Slouched, my head hung low and my dark hair made a curtain against the sun’s rays. Feeling like a flu had taken a hold’a me, it took all my energy to simply raise my arm and beckon Vera inside.
Vera jumped on the bed, rattling my insides.
“Mmm,” I said after taking a sip. “Tea.”
“Sweet, just like Mama made it,” Vera chirped.
“Where is your mama?” The words slipped out. I was so tired and ill feeling I didn’t think how personal a question it was. I was about to tell her she didn’t have to answer, but Vera was already speaking.
“Dead.” She said it so simply, as if I’d asked her the time or weather. I nodded, sipping on the tea, not sure if I should keep asking questions or offer comfort. “What about you?”
“My mama? She’s alive. Or something.” Or something…I wasn’t sure you could call Mama alive. She was simply takin’ up space in the world now. Before, when Daddy was around, there hadn’t been much of her to begin with. She survived for me, so that I would live, I think. She’d bandaged my wounds and brought me books. She’d done the best she could, considering.
Considering Daddy was doing the best he could on her, nightly.
“Or something?” Vera asked.
“Or something,” I responded. I was still wrestling with my errant memories from the night’s dreams; I didn’t want to dive into the memories of Mama and Daddy with Vera.
Vera nodded. We held our cups of tea, watching the sunlight dance against the curtain. I think we were both caught up in memories we’d rather have forgotten. That’s the thing about me
mory, though. The ones you want to forget stick like glue and the ones you want to remember slip away like pictures in sand.
“Do you have a daddy?” Vera asked as another bright spot of sun spun like a ballerina against the curtain.
“He’s dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’d be the only one,” I whispered into my nearly empty cup.
“I never knew mine,” Vera said. “Always wondered what he was like.”